The Mourning Hours (13 page)

twenty-three

A
fter the press conference, things only got worse. It felt as if we were in the middle of our own tiny volcano with the pressure building and building, and we were waiting for it to blow. I watched from the kitchen window as Dad and Johnny emerged from the Caprice followed by Mom, already in midargument. Johnny pushed past me at the door and pounded up the stairs.

“Tricked us into it,” Mom was saying. Her face was red, the flush of a deep, public embarrassment.

“It’s probably not as bad as it seemed,” Aunt Julia said, trying to be kind.

Mom huffed. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

Aunt Julia nodded and started to speak, but Mom silenced her with a look that said she didn’t want to be babied, or pitied, or consoled. “I need to see it for myself,” she decided. “But we were set up! Come to the press conference, everyone said. Present a united front with the Lemkes...” Suddenly uncomfortable in her clothes, she began to wriggle her arms out of the navy blazer. Normally Dad would have stepped forward to assist—he was always on hand to help Mom with a necklace clasp or a back zipper—but this time he held back, keeping his distance. We all held back, watching her squirm.

The phone rang, and Mom grabbed for it, one arm still tangled in the blazer, the other sleeve flapping loose. “Hello?” she demanded, listened for a second, and slammed the receiver into the cradle. “Those damn reporters!”

“Alicia,” Dad began, tiredly, “if we don’t work with them—”

“They don’t want to work
with
us! Don’t you see that? They just want a story, and the story is us. The story is Johnny, the murderer.” Mom finally freed herself from her blazer and stood panting and triumphant before us. Aunt Julia took the blazer from Mom’s arms and hung it over the back of a chair.

“I should have known, I should have seen it,” Mom continued. “You get mixed up with a family like that, with a man like that...” She was moving around the kitchen like a madwoman, touching things haphazardly, not caring when she dragged the sleeve of her white turtleneck through a smear of strawberry jam on the counter, left over from breakfast. “Look what
we’ve
done, he says. What
we’ve
done! We! When all along I tried to discourage them.... And it was her! She was the one pushing him into a relationship!”

Dad tried to steady Mom with a hand on her shoulder, the pressure of his fingers on her arm. “Okay now, okay,” he kept repeating. “We just need to think this through.”

Mom picked up a bread knife, glanced around as if she were trying to find a loaf of bread, and set it down. “What does anything matter anymore? You heard the man. Johnny might as well just turn himself in this second for daring to touch his daughter. But that probably won’t be enough to satisfy him. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll only want to crucify the rest of us in the public square.” Her eyes flashed dangerously around the room, not settling on any of us.

“No one wants to crucify you—” Aunt Julia began.

The phone rang again, and Mom reached for it, but Dad was faster. “We have no comment at this time,” he said firmly, then held down the switch hook and set the receiver on the table. We stared at it, listening to the faint beeping sound of the busy signal.

Emilie came in from the living room, her face pale. “They’re going to replay it.”

We raced into the living room in time to see a montage of photos of Stacy flash silently across the screen: as a sticky-faced toddler on a summer day, holding a Popsicle; as a little girl in pigtails, about to dive into her birthday cake; as a sixth grader in front of her science project. I imagined Mrs. Lemke sobbing, pulling back the protective plastic sheet on a neatly organized photo album to remove these pictures.

Mom gasped as another photo appeared, one of Stacy sitting on the hood of Johnny’s truck, laughing. There were precise, towering rows of corn in the background, the tops foaming with tassels. A slant of late-afternoon sunlight hit her backside, lighting up her loose red hair like a halo of fire, the way it had been the first time I met her. Johnny must have taken the picture, I realized, not only because she was sitting on the Green Machine, but because she was flirting with the camera, her lips slightly parted, her expression teasing,
Come here.
She was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

The last picture, the one that lingered longest on the screen, was of Johnny and Stacy at their Winter Formal in December. They were standing in front of a black backdrop with thousands of sparkly stars, Johnny’s right arm wrapped around her shoulder, Stacy’s left arm tucked around his waist. We had a wallet-sized version of this photo stuck to the front of our refrigerator, but blown up like this, I noticed things I hadn’t seen before. Johnny was in his rented tux, broad-chested and strong-armed, and Stacy was in her sea-green chiffon dress with the cinched waist. They were smiling, but it was a smile-on-demand kind of situation, and both of them looked as if they were smiling only with their mouths. They stood close together—so close that Johnny’s arm looked too tight across Stacy’s shoulders, as if he wasn’t going to let her go without a fight. Somehow, I noticed, Stacy wasn’t looking directly at the camera. It was as if someone off to the side, out of range, had called her name and at any moment she was going to squirm free of Johnny’s stiff grasp.

The whole situation made me feel light-headed—my own brother on the television screen and the tiny picture from our refrigerator, such a small, personal thing, broadcast now to the greater Wisconsin area.

“I’ve had about enough,” Mom said, but we couldn’t drag ourselves away. All of a sudden Bill Lemke was on the screen again, standing on his front porch. While we’d been telling the reporters we had no comment, the Lemkes had apparently been inviting the world inside their house. There was Stacy’s bedroom, with its crisp and sterile white linens. There was a shot of the Lemkes sitting down to dinner at a table set for five, with one place conspicuously empty.

“What, no shot of the billiard table?” Dad murmured, his voice biting.

Then there was a video of Joanie and Heather taping up a Missing poster at the Chevron station off 151 and the announcer’s sober voice-over: “Missing the sister they might never see again.” Were the Lemkes watching this? Were Joanie and Heather gathered around a television set, too?

We all gasped when our property came into view, courtesy of the television crews parked at the end of our driveway that morning. This was our snow-covered lawn, the thick branches of our leafless oak trees. There was Grandpa’s house with its faded yellow curtains out in front, and our house tucked behind it, as if we had something to hide. Farther back was the barn, gleaming red from a new coat of paint last summer. At least we looked like respectable people—or, in the menacing way things looked on the news, bad people hiding behind a respectable facade.

The reporter, who had been rehashing the details of the search for Stacy Lemke, suddenly caught my attention again: “According to police reports, Stacy was a regular fixture at the Hammarstroms’ home in rural Watankee. Here her boyfriend, Johnny, helped on the family’s struggling dairy farm.”

“Now that’s going too far,” Aunt Julia protested.

Struggling dairy farm? I peeked at Dad, whose head was very still. Somehow, even though I’d overheard snatches of late-night conversations about finances—the mortgage, the renovations to the barn, milk prices—it had never occurred to me that we might be
poor.
Dad was always trading one good or service for another, sure, but it seemed smart, not cheap, when he delivered a load of firewood to Ted Nagel after Ted fixed the thermostat on our milk tank. And mostly Dad could fix things himself, at least temporarily. Mom referred to his homemade fixes as “Okie innovations,” and until it was pointed out to me, I’d believed Okie was some kind of Swedish slang for genius. It had simply never occurred to me that finances kept Dad from buying the part, hiring a repairman, or scrapping the whole thing for a new machine.

“Tensions continue to run high between the Lemkes and the Hammarstroms,” the reporter said smartly, and the screen cut to that morning’s press conference—Mrs. Lemke nearly toppling, Mr. Lemke pointing at my parents, Mom firing back.

I watched Mom watch herself from between her spread fingers, as if she was peeping at a horror show. “Oh, God,” she sobbed into her hands. “I shouldn’t have, I know. I just couldn’t stand there and...”

Watching Mom cry gave me this funny feeling all over, as if something was inside my skin, crawling up and down my body, alerting every nerve ending all at once.

In two steps Dad was at the television, and with one flick of his wrist the set was darkened. We sat that way for a long time, with Mom crying and none of us sure what to do.

Then Aunt Julia cleared her throat, murmuring something about having to run a few errands. “Anyone want to come with me?” she asked, but Emilie and I shook our heads.

What was worse, staying in the house where we only had to face each other, or heading into town, after everyone in Watankee had watched the Hammarstrom family drama, tangled and juicy as any soap opera, unfold on their television sets? Aunt Julia gave our hands a quick squeeze and left, the screen door flapping quietly into place behind her.

Emilie walked slowly to the stairs, but instead of following her, I slipped out through the back door. Kennel trotted over, his pink tongue wagging, and we sat on the steps near the kitchen window, which Aunt Julia had opened just a crack.

Dad was saying, “It won’t help anything if we don’t calm down. We just need to get hold of ourselves. Maybe what we need to do is to talk to someone.”

Mom’s laugh was so harsh and unfunny, it made my skin tingle. “Oh, yes, I can see it now. Pastor Ziegler, what does the Bible say we should do when our son is a suspect in a criminal investigation, and the whole town—”

“Quiet down now,” Dad said firmly. “I wasn’t talking about Pastor Ziegler. I was thinking, maybe, you know, some kind of an attorney.”

“A lawyer?” Mom shrieked. “We haven’t done anything, and we should get a lawyer?”

“Damn it, Alicia,” Dad said, losing his patience. “I’m not saying we need a lawyer. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to talk to someone, see all our options. Bill Lemke knows the law—this is his world. We’ve got to be able to keep up with him.”

“A lawyer,” Mom repeated more quietly. “Even if we did need one, we couldn’t afford it. What does something like that cost? There would be a retainer fee—that’s hundreds of dollars right there, maybe more.”

There was a silence, and the word
lawyer
rang in my ears. Wouldn’t we be admitting that Johnny was guilty if Mom and Dad talked to a lawyer? Regular people didn’t have lawyers, did they? On television, lawyers were reserved for criminals, thieves and well...murderers.

Dad said, “Maybe we could ask my dad.”

“Are you kidding me? Because he’s been so supportive up to this point, hasn’t he? I bet right now he’s sitting in front of that TV, rewinding the video of the press conference and shaking his head, ashamed he even knows us.”

“That’s not fair.” Dad’s voice was wounded. “He doesn’t know how to handle this any better than we do.”

Mom sputtered, “I’m sorry it’s been so hard on
him!
”

“Well, maybe it won’t even cost anything just to talk to someone. Those television ads always say that new clients are entitled to a free thirty-minute consultation.”

“I don’t think we want the kind of help we can get for free.” Mom sighed. “Can’t you just imagine everyone in town whispering about us?
Those Hammarstroms, hiding behind their lawyer.
We’ve been completely honest and cooperative.”

I shivered suddenly, although the afternoon was warming and Kennel’s body was draped over my legs like a heavy blanket. Maybe Dad and Mom had been completely honest, but I hadn’t. Telling Aunt Julia about the fight between Stacy and Johnny that night wasn’t exactly the same as telling it to Detective Halliday.

“You worry too much about that,” Dad said sharply. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. This is about our family.” He stressed the word—
family.
That was always how Dad saw things, as if our 160 acres was its own tiny kingdom, removed from everyone and everything else.

Mom cried then, unable to find her words.

“Okay,” Dad said. “Let’s just play it by ear. No lawyer, no press conferences, no reporters—”

“And we’ll avoid the Lemkes at all costs.”

Dad’s voice was quiet, considering. “I don’t think that he... I mean, deep down, I’m not sure that Bill believes what he said back there. It’s just grief and frustration talking. How would we react if...well, if the unthinkable happened?”

“The unthinkable has happened,” Mom pointed out, which is just what I was thinking, too. We were always planning for what came next—the plowing, the planting, the harvest, not enough rain or too much, the heifers birthing, the calves being vaccinated. But this hadn’t been on our radar, hadn’t been anywhere near our map of the world. It was unthinkable that a person could just go missing, that Stacy Lemke could disappear from the face of the earth. And it was unthinkable—wasn’t it?—that my brother could have been the reason she disappeared.

Mom continued, calmly now, “But this didn’t just happen to Bill Lemke, or Johnny, or Stacy. It’s happened to all of us.”

twenty-four

A
fter their conversation, I waited for Mom or Dad to come out onto the porch, to scold me for sitting outside without a coat, to ask if I was hungry or even if I could help with the laundry. I wondered if anyone cared about how I felt, knowing that the world was watching my family on TV, how it felt to miss the district spelling bee I’d studied hard for, how it felt to be so insignificant that no one even noticed where I was. The longer I waited, the more I convinced myself that I wasn’t important anymore. I wasn’t forgotten, exactly—just no longer an essential variable of the Hammarstrom equation. If I went missing, no one would even notice.

I hopped to my feet, nudging Kennel off my lap, and took off at a sprint, as if I could outrun my thoughts. I was only wearing tennis shoes, but I didn’t care when the half-melted snow seeped through my jeans and ankle socks. I passed the dark windows of Grandpa’s workshop and entered the barn through the door nearest the calf pen, my chest heaving. Dozens of heads swiveled in my direction, huge cow eyes studying me uncertainly. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I soothed, but my voice was cracked and anxious, and the calves drew back as I passed down the center aisle, their heads out of reach of my outstretched hand. That was all I wanted—for someone to tell me everything was okay, and mean it, too.

In the hayloft, I let the kittens climb all over me, mewling and licking. They were still tiny, crawling, blind things. Their mama, half-wild, lay on her side, licking her raw nipples. I would just stay here, then, I told myself, the one place where none of the rest of it mattered.

Alone, it was easy to torture myself with my thoughts. What if I had said something or done something—would Stacy still be here? If I had said “Johnny, I saw you and Stacy fighting” right when he came in that night, with Mom pulling a casserole out of the oven and Emilie setting the table, what then? If I had told Mom that they’d been in his bedroom, the doors shut, the bedsprings creaking—what then? If I could go back in time, to the softball game, to the moment when Stacy Lemke’s shadow had fallen over me, what then?

I couldn’t undo anything, not even a single second. If this were one of the novels I’d read, I would disappear into a time machine and travel backward until I could set things straight. But this wasn’t a novel. This was my real life, and there was no time machine. I couldn’t change Stacy and Johnny meeting or their first kiss or the desperate way she’d clung to him. The past was the past.

One of the kittens settled into the crook of my neck and I sobbed quietly. If I sobbed louder, would someone from the house hear me and come running? I tried it, letting my breath come in exaggerated, ugly gasps until I’d worked myself into a true fit.

What would Nancy Drew do, I wondered? Sit by herself and cry until the tears dripped one by one, salty, into her mouth? No. She would gather together her crew—George, Bess and Ned, and if she was desperate, her lawyer father, Carson—and she would work the case.

I sat, tipping the kitten into a soft pile of straw, and took a deep breath. I didn’t have a crew, so I would have to work the case alone. It was hard to focus at first, to allow myself to replay the possibilities in my mind.

Maybe—I considered first—Stacy had just wandered off and gotten lost in the snowstorm. Maybe she had sat down to rest for a minute, to get her bearings. She would have been sleepy, too tired to move on. Maybe she’d given up wandering and figured she’d just wait it out, and eventually someone would come along. But instead she’d frozen to death—it’d been about twenty degrees that night, cold enough so that even inside the house, I’d been bundled up in bed beneath several quilts. Then her body had been buried under the new snow. I wanted this to be true—the simple, sad explanation where no one was guilty. But it didn’t really seem possible—not for someone who had spent sixteen winters in Wisconsin, who had driven these roads every day of her life and had probably known every farm, telephone pole and fence post. She would have known where she was, how to make it home.

Or else—

Stacy might have been nearly home, around the bend on Passaqua Road, when a truck pulled up. I could picture it, one of those massive trucks that barreled past when I walked to Aunt Julia’s on summer days, crossing the divider bumps of the middle lane as a courtesy but still engulfing me briefly in its downdraft. These trucks were always driven by men, but none of their faces stood out in my memory; they were just pale flashes, there and gone, a mile down the road before I registered their presence. I imagined this driver shooting down Passaqua Road toward 151, his last load delivered, when he spotted Stacy. She would have been bundled up against the stinging cold, her face down. He would have rolled down his snow-crusted window, asked, “Can I take you somewhere?” I couldn’t give him a face, only a baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a jacket collar pulled up to his chin. And Stacy, sweet, trusting Stacy who didn’t watch detective shows where cold-blooded killers were always afoot, would have smiled and said, “Sure! Thanks.” He would have had to hand her up into the cab of his truck, noticing only then her red hair, the brush of freckles across her face, the tears dried on her cheeks. She would have stretched out her frozen fingers in front of the heater and said, “I live just a mile or so in that direction.” Maybe she thought she could get Johnny back, make him jealous, show him that a real man—a gentleman—would deposit her right at her front door.

But I couldn’t imagine what was next with any clarity, only the missed turn off Passaqua, Stacy’s protests. She’d been taken to God knows where. In the books I devoured, the heroines could get out of any sticky situation with a little bit of cunning and luck, and nothing was ever done that couldn’t be undone. But it had been four days now, and if someone had Stacy...well, he wasn’t in any hurry to return her. That was how it always played out on the opening moments of a police drama—a woman’s body was found, covered over with a white sheet, and what was done couldn’t be undone.

It was easier, maybe, to think that Stacy had been picked up by someone she knew, another boy from school, someone who looked friendly. Someone she trusted, like Erik Hansen or Peter Bahn from the wrestling team, or any one of a hundred junior or senior boys at Lincoln High. But it didn’t make sense. I could no more imagine one of them taking Stacy than I could imagine them taking me. Who would ever want to hurt Stacy Lemke? This just wasn’t the way people were in Watankee. In big cities, I knew, people kept their houses locked even when they were at home. In Watankee, you could walk right into someone’s home if you wanted to return a casserole pan or drop off a half bushel of apples you’d picked only that morning; their back doors were always unlocked. If Stacy had been taken by someone she knew, then nobody was safe. We would all have to start keeping one eye behind us as we hung clothes on the line, as we walked to the bus stop, as we carted groceries to the car.

But if none of these explanations was right, then what was left? It looked bad for Johnny, I knew, but deep down I couldn’t imagine that he had done something to Stacy, something horrible that ended up with Stacy dead, her body hidden. He just wasn’t a mastermind like the killers on TV shows, planning and plotting and lying and sticking to his story. He would have had to run his truck off the road on purpose, to concoct the whole story. It wasn’t possible. Not Johnny, not Stacy.

And yet...he was strong, a fierce competitor, stubborn as anything. I had watched him in our own living room take down full-grown men like nothing. And what if Stacy really was pregnant, like I’d thought for months, carrying Johnny’s child, the grandchild that none of his grandparents would welcome. What if Johnny hadn’t wanted the baby—had wanted, instead, the wrestling scholarship, the chance to leave Watankee behind once and for all? Maybe that’s what they were arguing about when Stacy pushed him that Tuesday, just over a week ago. Stacy would have insisted, would have gone desperate in her attempt to keep him.
I’ll die without you,
she would have said.
I’ll kill myself and kill this baby, too.
Whatever she’d said, Johnny hadn’t called her later that night, like usual; he’d gone to his room after dinner and avoided the phone. Once he picked her up on Saturday night, there was no other person on earth who remembered seeing them, not the cashier at the theater or the waitress at the Humble Bee. Johnny had been the last person to see Stacy alive, had been alone with her late at night, the snow falling. I understood why the police officers had grilled him over and over. What other explanation could there be?

Doubting Johnny felt like the biggest sin of my life, bigger than telling a lie or plotting revenge, bigger than even the “unforgivable sin” Pastor Ziegler was always warning against. I’d worried more than once that it was unforgivable to even think about the unforgivable sin, because if it was, then I was doomed. I felt the same sort of panic thinking that Johnny had somehow hurt Stacy Lemke. If anything was unforgivable, it was believing this.

It’s not Johnny,
I told myself.
It can’t be Johnny.

But deep inside, a little voice answered me back: it has to be.